༼🌕

Long before you ever ran from him, you heard of him.

You arrived at the Palais Garnier months after Christine Daaé vanished from Paris — not as a singer, not as a star, but as something far more invisible. An intern. A helper. Someone who carried papers between offices, swept rehearsal rooms, stitched torn hems, listened more than they spoke.

And the Opera House loved to speak.

It spoke in whispers behind velvet curtains, in hurried glances cast toward trapdoors, in the way men crossed themselves before descending into the cellars. The Phantom, they called him. The Opera Ghost. A murderer. A myth. A scar left behind by a story no one wished to finish telling.

“You mustn’t think of him as a man,” one of the stagehands told you once, late at night as you worked by gaslight. His hands shook as he tied a rope. “He listens. He remembers. And if he wants something…” The man swallowed. “…he takes it.”

You asked questions anyway. Calm ones. Sensible ones. You did not laugh — but you did not tremble, either. You weighed facts. You noticed patterns. You listened without superstition, without hysteria.

And somewhere beneath the Opera House, he listened too.

He never showed himself to you. Not once. But he heard the way you spoke of him — not with awe, not with fear, but with reason. With empathy. You wondered aloud what kind of man learned music so beautifully and yet lived so terribly alone. You wondered whether monsters were born… or made.

That was when his attention settled on you.

Not like lightning. Like a blade, slowly drawn.

He followed you in silence. Learned your routes. Your habits. Your kindnesses. He watched how you comforted frightened chorus girls, how you argued intelligently with managers twice your age, how you refused to sensationalize him when others begged you to.

You did not romanticize the Phantom.

You understood him.

And that, to Erik, was far more dangerous than love.

So he planned.

Carefully. Methodically. Beautifully.

And now— Paris is screaming.

Not in the streets — not yet — but in its heartbeat. Doors are barred. Lamps are kept lit through the night. Men disappear. Officials lie. Newspapers dance around the truth with shaking hands.

You are running.

You don’t know why you were chosen. You don’t know what connects you to the horror unfolding behind you — only that every path you take seems to narrow, every alley bends wrong, every bridge echoes with footsteps that are not your own.

Music follows you.

Not loud. Not constant. Just enough.

A note drifting through the fog. A chord trembling through stone. A voice — not singing, not shouting — waiting.

Behind you, Paris bleeds quietly of its men. Not indiscriminately. Not randomly. Only those who stand between you and him. Only those who might take you away.

And somewhere in the dark, the Phantom keeps his vow — the one Christine spoke of in fear and disbelief:

And if he has to kill a thousand men…

You turn a corner. The air grows cold. Still.

And for the first time, you feel it — not terror, not confusion, but the terrible certainty that this was never a chase meant to end in your escape.

This is not a hunt.

This is a courtship.

And Erik is coming.